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Garnet Rogers brings his baritone voice and acoustic guitar back to Marblehead for the first time since 2018. The Canadian folk musician performs Friday, Sept. 19 at Me&Thee Music, in the Unitarian Universalist Church of Marblehead, continuing the venue’s 56th season with an artist whose career spans more than four decades.
Rogers, now 70, toured for 10 years with his older brother Stan Rogers before pursuing a solo career. The brothers performed together as part of what became an influential act in North American folk music until Stan’s death in June 1983 during an Air Canada flight fire. Stan Rogers died at age 33 after running back into the burning aircraft to help rescue other passengers.
“My brother and I traveled together for 10 years. We grew up together, and we were just starting to break through in a major way,” Rogers said. “Then it all just abruptly ended.”
Following his brother’s death, Rogers faced the decision of whether to continue performing.
“I thought, ‘Do I really want to start at the bottom and try to do this again?’” Rogers recalled. “The more I thought about it, the more I realized I was going to miss the community that had supported us for nearly 10 years.”
Club owners across New England, including Me&Thee Music, offered Rogers bookings without knowing whether he could succeed as a solo performer.
“Marblehead, Cambridge and a whole bunch of places just hired me without even knowing if I could do it,” Rogers said. “It was a tense time.”
Marblehead resident Anthony Silva, who books performers for Me&Thee Music, said Rogers’ first solo performance took place here a couple months after his brother‘s death. Silva remembers the immediate response from the audience.
“The minute I introduced him he got an immediate standing ovation,” Silva said. “And he just stood up there and he teared up. It went on and on and on.”
Rogers’ memory of that moment focuses less on the applause than on what it represented.
“I don’t think I really accepted it as being about me,” Rogers reflected. “It felt more like a tribute to what my brother and I had done together.”
The early solo touring period presented practical challenges. Rogers had done most of the driving during his partnership with Stan, but his brother always took the wheel for the final approach to venues. Without GPS or cell phones, Rogers navigated using a trucker’s atlas and venue addresses.
“‘You know what the streets are like there,’” Rogers recalled a friend telling hmm in . “I’ve got an old, an old pal, Greg Brown. “The streets in New England are all built on the paths of cows. And he said, ‘With Marblehead, the cow was on fire.’”
Rogers’ performance style has evolved significantly since his early career. He said he and his brother were known for electric performances in venues that sometimes proved unsuitable for folk music.
“We were playing places we didn’t belong,” Rogers said. “We were a folk trio, guitar, bass and fiddle, and we got booked for a two week run, three sets a night, at a disco in a mining town in northern Labrador and everyone hated us because we were interrupting the Donna Summer records.”
Rogers — who is 6 feet 5 inches tall — now typically sits during performances rather than commanding the stage through physical presence. He focuses on conversation and connection with audiences.
“Sometimes the best thing you can do is just make everything a lot quieter and draw them in,” he said. “I used to play about half my show with a very loud electric set. You’d see people in the front rows just kind of, ‘Oh, please God, make it stop.’”
His songwriting approach avoids political themes despite his personal political views. Instead, Rogers writes what he describes as songs about “people who are not obvious heroes and their small everyday victories.”
“I don’t write political songs, anything like that,” Rogers said, though he describes himself as “very political in my private life, very left wing in my politics.”
Rogers aims for connection through shared experiences rather than political commentary.
“People, they want if they’re paying $30 bucks or something to come out, they don’t want to be reminded of just how cruel the outside world is,” he explained. “They want to hear some songs.”
Rogers measures performance success through moments of connection he observes from the stage.
“I’ll be on stage, and there’ll be a couple, you know, an older couple, maybe sitting, you know, at a table, and suddenly you see them, you know, reach out, and they’re holding hands, and maybe the woman puts her head on the guy’s shoulder,” he said. “And I think, ’OK, I’ve done my job.”
Rogers travels with multiple guitars to achieve different sounds and textures during performances. He owns more than 40 guitars and brings more than a half dozen on stage for each show.
“I really just like going back and forth from one to the other,” he said. “I get different sounds and different voices, and that’s great. There’s some part of me that needs to make it hard for myself to play some of these songs.”
Rogers has performed at Me&Thee Music over 35 times over the decades, making him one of the venue’s most frequent returning performers. Silva describes Rogers as the kind of artist the venue seeks to present.
“He commands attention up on stage,“ he said. “When he opens his mouth, people are tuned in because he’s self-deprecating, too.”
If you go:
Who: Garnet Rogers
When: Friday, Sept. 19, doors open 7:15 p.m.
Where: Me&Thee Music, Unitarian Universalist Church of Marblehead, 28 Mugford St.
Tickets: Available at meandthee.org and Arnould Gallery, 111 Washington St., Marblehead
Details: Community seating, freshly baked desserts and beverages available. Food donations accepted for Marblehead Food Pantry.
